Friday 19 December 2008

Removing XP from Windows Boot Manager

The other day I figured I'd try installing XP on my Vista lappie. Unfortunately, I did not bother to read properly, and just went ahead and tried. Now one problem I have is that my DVD drive in the laptop has been wonky from the getgo. I also did not bother creating a second partition (d'oh).

Anyway, after starting the installation and going through the initial setup steps, my laptop started showing a new screen called Windows Boot Manager which showed the new XP setup, and was for some reason using that as a default boot. The end result was constant blue screens.

I eventually solved the problem by first having Vista display hidden folders and files, as well as OS files. Having done that, removing the XP entry is as simple as deleting the boot.ini file from the root folder of the drive. You can also remove the XP install folders called $WIN_NT$.~BT and $WIN_NT$.~LS.

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